


Ten Thousand More to Go

by groveofbones



Series: Down in My Dreams [3]
Category: Blade Runner (Movies)
Genre: Developing Friendships, Families of Choice, Family Feels, Gen, K Getting a Happy Ending Because He Deserves It, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-12
Updated: 2020-03-12
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:27:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23122465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/groveofbones/pseuds/groveofbones
Summary: They've been traveling together for a couple of months, and they're all starting to wonder where their journey is going to take them. K feels like he has to ask himself a question that he doesn't want to know the answer to: Would Rick and Ana be better off without him?
Relationships: Officer K | Joe & Ana Stelline, Officer K | Joe & Rick Deckard & Ana Stelline, Rick Deckard & Ana Stelline, Rick Deckard & Officer K | Joe
Series: Down in My Dreams [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1525157
Comments: 6
Kudos: 62





	Ten Thousand More to Go

K had this dream that he often circled back to. He couldn’t go more than a few days without having it again.

He dreamed he was back in the debriefing room in Los Angeles, sitting in front of the light and hearing the repeated words, drawing him into the half-trance that would, somehow, in some way he’d never really understood, let them know if he was still functional. He was putting up with it, as he always did, forcing down the uneasy nausea and the uptick in his heart rate that always accompanied the procedure, keeping his face bland and pleasant because bland and pleasant was the only way that the human police would accept a replicant. He’d known that as long as he’d existed.

Something would catch his attention, though, something slightly different about the formula that the voice would be running through. The questions would start to feel strange, although he was rarely able to remember, when he woke up, exactly what the questions had been. The longer the questions went on, the more he would be aware that they were building up to something, something that was just at the edge of his mind.

And, all of a sudden, he would realize that they were asking him about another life altogether, a life where he was wandering through the abandoned lands of the former United States with two other people, and just at the moment he realized that, he would realize, too, that the formula served a single purpose: to erase all of his memories of that other life, so that he could be the perfect replicant Blade Runner again.

It would be too late, though. The procedure would be nearly complete, and he would be able to feel his memories of them slipping out of his mind, buried deep by the inescapable questions.

And that would be the point when he woke up, his heart pounding against his ribs, his eyes wide in his face. He would keep himself completely still, staring up at whatever was over his head, whether it was a ceiling or the stars, and he would think through everything that had happened to him since he had left Los Angeles. He would hover over every memory, good or bad, every decision, every quiet moment and fearful moment and happy moment and devastated moment, just to make sure there was nothing missing.

Just to make sure that his mind was still his own.

Some nights, he would be able to fall asleep again afterward, fairly quickly. Those were usually the nights when all three of them were sleeping in the same place, and he could hear Rick and Ana breathing. How could he have lost his mind when they were there, adding sounds to the stillness of the night?

Other nights, when they had all taken a different room in whatever structure they’d found to be in overnight, he would lie awake for hours, perhaps even the remainder of the night. 

Luckily for him, he’d gotten quite used to operating with the bare minimum of sleep, so he didn’t think his traveling companions noticed anything different in him on the days after bad nights. He could still do everything that he had to, could still keep his eyes open for any pursuits or threats, could still help navigate.

He could still be useful.

***

They’d parted ways with the car they’d taken from Los Angeles on the other side of the Sierra Nevada mountains, after it had finally run down its fuel cells beyond repair. After that, they’d walked for a while, until they found a little town that was in the process of harvesting their fields. They’d been able to trade a few days of labor, and the location of the broken-down car, which still had a lot of parts that could be salvaged, for an old, rusty wheeled truck. 

It wasn’t the most convenient way to get around, since they had to limit themselves to the old roads, which weren’t always in the best repair, and couldn’t always take the shortest route as the crow (or car) flies. But it was quicker and more comfortable than walking. Ana was particularly glad; they’d gotten her a pair of good boots, but she’d still gotten blisters within a few hours of continuous walking. She wasn’t used to that sort of thing, the way Rick and K were.

When they first started with the wheeled car, Rick had done all the driving. He had the experience. “Drove one of these out of LA the first time I left,” he’d said, smiling with a bit of sadness. The first time he’d left LA, he’d told them, had been when he’d left with Ana’s mother. It made K himself sad to remember the way he’d seen that journey end, with a skeleton in a box, buried carefully under a tree, with all the love that Rick Deckard and Sapper Morton could give her.

The longer they’d traveled, though, the more Rick had started showing K and Ana how to drive something wheeled, as well. K was extremely frustrated, although he tried not to show it, that driving seemed to be something that he was extremely bad at. He knew how to drive an air car, after all. He’d spent his entire life building his combat skills, his situational awareness, his ability to move his body any way he needed to to get out of a situation alive and win a fight, and yet, when it came to driving, he just couldn’t seem to coordinate himself. He stalled the car at least once every time he did a shift driving, and had to drive slower than Rick and Ana did because he kept accidentally inching the car off the edge of the road.

Ana, in contrast, was excellent at driving. She almost always managed to hit the clutch at the perfect time to switch gears, and could keep the car steady no matter the terrain. 

“It’s just something to sink into,” Ana said when he asked her about it. “Just like making memories. You’re just getting too into your head. You’re thinking each action before you do it, and it slows you down.”

Ana had talked about making memories before, how it was more a matter of instinct than of conscious thought. It took feelings to make a memory feel right. K wished his instincts would hurry up and settle, so that he could stop embarrassing himself.

“You’ll learn,” Rick said, seemingly unconcerned, but it smarted, a bit. 

“How did you learn how to drive?” he asked Rick once.

Rick laughed loudly, and shook his head. “I learned the same way you guys are learning. You think I knew how to drive something with wheels before I took Rachael and I out of LA? I sure thought I’d be able to, though. I was so confident. It’s a miracle we didn’t crash and burn the first day.”

K was slightly mollified by the idea that Rick had once been terrible at driving, too. He imagined himself, one day, making it look as easy as Rick did. There were a lot of moments, he realized, that he wanted to be the way Rick was.

***

They didn’t really have a destination in mind. K thought that Rick and Ana had relaxed their hyper-vigilance after the first few months, when no pursuit seemed to appear, but somehow, K couldn’t. He knew that it was unlikely that Tyrell would find them now, after failing to find them for so long, unless they did something really, really stupid. And yet, he couldn’t seem to stop looking over his shoulder. When he wasn’t dreaming about the procedure, he dreamed about Luv and the building fear that he wouldn’t be able to defeat her, that he’d die and lose everything he’d gained.

Sometimes he dreamed about Luv stepping down on Joi’s projector. He tried so hard to never think about that when he was awake, but it would creep in when he was asleep.

Perhaps it was the dreams that made it impossible for him to accept that they might, just maybe, be safe. He felt as if he was expecting Tyrell’s creatures to come around the corner at any moment, as if he woke up every morning waiting for them and went to bed every night understanding that it would be the next day that he’d have to fight and run again. He wished he could be more like Rick and Ana. Sometimes, and this was the thing that he hated about himself, sometimes he was angry at them, for being able to put the possibility of pursuit out of their heads.

He wondered if he would ever be able to be like them, if he would ever be able to put Luv and Tyrell and the shattering sound that took Joi out of his life and the cold water of the sea trying to pour its way down his throat and everything else behind him. 

There were days, though, when he thought he might be getting close.

Those were the days that Rick would start talking, seemingly out of nowhere, about the last time he’d made a journey like this, sharing stories of the things they’d seen. Or those were the days that he and Ana would seem to slip into an easy way of teasing each other, a kind of insult without intent to hurt that he’d only ever seen in movies. Or those were the days that he’d find himself sitting beside Rick and Ana with no words being said at all, just watching the sun set over the horizon or the trees move in a gust of wind or the flocks of birds wheel through the sky together.

There were days when he thought he might be getting close to forgetting all the fear.

***

“Are we… Are we going somewhere?” Ana asked, after two months of travel, zigzagging and crisscrossing. She was sitting in the front seat of the truck, with Rick driving, and K was in the back seat, trying to make it look like he was gazing out the back window because he was enjoying the view, rather than because he was obsessively searching the cloudy sky for any sign of air cars.

Out of the corner of his eye, K could see Rick’s hands tighten slightly on the steering wheel. K kept his face turned away. He didn’t like when people started having strong emotions around him; he was always afraid that those emotions would be anger. He would just be present, staring out the rear window, and not taking part if any kind of confrontation broke out.

But, when Rick spoke again, he didn’t sound angry. He sounded… uncertain? “I’m… not really sure. Like I said, I’m not… I don’t have the most up-to-date information about what places would be safe. For us.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to…” Ana trailed off, and then gave an explosive sigh. She sounded uncertain, too, and K thought that she didn’t like being uncertain about things. “I’m not unhappy. I was just… wondering.”

K considered not saying anything, he really did. It was… not in the interests of self-preservation, to say anything. But, when it came to Rick and Ana, self-preservation wasn’t always in the forefront of his mind.

“You don’t have a marker,” K said, and gestured to Ana when she turned around to look at him. “Do you, Ana? You weren’t… programmed, grown. No one would be able to tell, from the outside, that you’re…” He trailed off. Somehow, even out in the wilderness, it seemed dangerous to say what she really was.

“Do you?” Ana asked. “Have some kind of… marker?”

K opened his mouth to answer, but Rick beat him to it, talking fast as if to keep K from saying anything. “Yeah, he’s got one. All replicants do. That’s a good point, though. We’ll have to pick a place carefully. Somewhere they don’t have Voigt-Kampf testing or anything else.”

For a moment, K was frustrated that they didn’t seem to understand what he was trying to say to them. That they didn’t seem to understand that, if they were trying to distance themselves from being found out, it might be easier if they didn’t travel with someone who could be relatively easily recognized as a replicant, with the right equipment.

But Ana had already turned back around and was staring out at the road like she was thinking, and when he glanced over in Rick’s direction, he realized that the other man was watching him intently in the rear-view mirror.

Perhaps Rick had understood what he was trying to say, after all. Perhaps he had simply disagreed.

K turned to look back out the window, at the road vanishing into the distance behind him. Something about the conversation had made him feel at ease, made his search of the skies less frantic. Something had made the threat they had left behind seem less… threatening.

***

“What the hell is that?” Rick asked one day, when he was in the passenger seat and K was attempting to maneuver the truck down the pocked old road. 

K immediately tensed. He desperately wanted to look where Rick was pointing, but he also didn’t want to take his eyes off the road. The road was elevated above the rest of the surrounding flat land, and he really, really didn’t want to run off it. He’d just have to trust his fellow Blade Runner to let him know if there was something he needed to fight or run from.

“Wait, I see it too,” Ana said, leaning into the space between the driver and passenger seats, shading her eyes with her hand. K wanted to tell her that the movement in the corner of his eye was distracting, and that he wanted her to sit back in her seat, but he was too tense to say it politely, so he didn’t say it at all.

“It’s moving along the ground, on one of the roads, I think,” Rick said. “It must be another wheeled vehicle.”

K relaxed, just slightly. If it was Tyrell’s goons, they would be coming from the air, not in something that moved on wheels.

“It’s big, though, right?” Ana asked, and K tensed all over again.

“Yeah. Really big, it looks like. K, there’s a turnoff ahead, maybe you could pull the truck over.” Rick’s voice was calm, but a kind of calm that K recognized. Rick was concerned, which meant that K was concerned.

The truck was silent as K pulled the truck onto the turnoff. His eyes scanned around. It wasn’t a good spot, to hide or to fight. The land all around was flat. They could possibly hide in the divot beside the road, but then they’d have the low ground, and they couldn’t cover up the truck. Someone would know to look for them when they saw it.

“Best thing to do is to seem unafraid,” Rick muttered, and K nodded tightly. Ana looked between the two of them, then nodded herself.

They arranged themselves carefully, to look as if they weren’t looking to start a fight but wouldn’t hesitate to defend themselves. Rick motioned Ana to take up a place a little behind them, with most of her body covered by the truck, to mask the fact that she had no gun. The size of the truck would limit how many people they could conceivably have with them, but the people who were approaching might think they had other people down below the road, ready to spring an ambush.

They could only hope.

It seemed to take an eternity for the other vehicle to get close enough for them to figure out what it was. When it did, K couldn’t help the widening of his eyes. It looked a bit like the wheeled truck they’d been driving, but enormous and boxy, and had clearly been mended with scrap metal patches several times. It belched chemical smelling exhaust from its back.

Rick gave a short, sharp laugh. “What is it?” Ana asked nervously.

“People used to camp in things like that,” Rick said, but they didn’t ask for an explanation, too busy waiting.

The giant box on wheels crept forward at a snail’s pace, seeming to ratchet the tension in K’s body higher and higher, until it finally rattled to a stop just within shouting distance. K kept his hand on the stock of his gun, waiting, concentrating on making sure that his breathing was even and deep. It would do him no good to starve himself of oxygen.

The passenger door of the boxy vehicle opened, and a young man, about the age that K appeared, hopped down to the ground. He held his hands carefully at his sides, where they could see them, and stepped to the front of the vehicle, but no closer.

“Hello!” the young man called to them. “We’re just passing through, peacefully. We can offer some hospitality.”

K only relaxed the tiniest bit at the words. By mutual agreement, he and Ana kept silent as Rick stepped forward to speak for them. “We’re also just passing through. Peacefully. What kind of hospitality you got?”

The young man glanced back at the windshield, at whoever was in the driver’s seat. K couldn’t see them through the glass. Then the man turned back to them and shrugged. “Food, mostly. A bit to trade if you’ve got goods. News from east of here. We’ve got some whiskey to crack open, if that suits you.”

K’s could feel the adrenaline running through him. It was just like being back in Los Angeles, wondering if any conversation would turn into a confrontation, wondering how many people he passed by on the street would attack him if they knew what he was, wondering whether the spray-painted insults would escalate into something else. He didn’t want Rick to say yes; he wanted them all to get back in the car and drive away, as fast as they could.

Rick glanced back at them, and K kept his face still. He didn’t want Rick to see how afraid he was. Ana was smiling, a little, and Rick smiled back and turned to the young man. “Sounds good. We don’t have much to trade, but we’d be happy to share what we’ve got. And we’re definitely interested in the news.”

The young man grinned across his whole face and gestured back the way the boxy vehicle had come, the way K and Rick and Ana had been going. “There’s a turnoff a couple of miles that way. Meet us there?”

Rick nodded, and waved K and Ana back into the truck. Rick slid into the driver’s side, and pulled the truck back onto the road, and they were off again. K gripped the back of his seat and looked out the rear window, watching the boxy vehicle turn around and trying not to think about the feeling of being trapped in a building full of people who despised him.

***

It was a little awkward at first, sitting together, the five of them, around a little campfire that the older man had set up. The younger man gamely tried to strike up conversation, introducing himself as Rafael and the older man as his father, Miguel, talking about the distances they’d traveled and the things they’d seen, but K and Rick and Ana were unused to talking to people other than each other, and it was slow going at first.

But then Miguel got the fire going and disappeared into the back of their vehicle, emerging again with dumplings in a cast-iron pan that he set over the fire, as well as a bottle of whiskey and five little glasses. After that, with drink shared and the smell of cooking dough and meat filling the air, the conversation became a little easier.

“Where are you headed?” Rafael asked, and Rick shrugged.

“Not quite sure yet,” he answered. “We came from the coast, just trying to go somewhere new. You?”

“San Francisco, we think,” Rafael answered. “We had a farm near Chicago, but the land went bad, so we had to find something else to do. Spent some time in Chicago, but it just wasn’t for us. If we have to live in a city, we at least want it to be somewhere warm.”

Rick barked a laugh and took a sip of his whiskey. “Well,” he said, “San Francisco is only warm some of the time. I’d tell you to try Los Angeles, but it’s a bit rough at the moment.”

“Mmm,” Miguel said laconically, turning over the dumplings with a set of tongs. They’d gotten crispy on the bottom, and K abruptly realized that he was ravenously hungry. “Heard that in Chicago.”

Out of the corner of his eye, K saw Ana tip her glass of whiskey back and swallow it all at once. “That’s pretty good,” she said brightly, and Rafael grinned.

“A friend of ours distilled it,” he said. “Loaded us up with bottles before we left, to make sure we had something to sip on in the evenings on the road.”

K sniffed the liquor. It mostly smelled like chemicals. He took a sip of it and had to struggle not to cough. It made his eyes water. He carefully put the glass down. Rick clapped a hand on his shoulder and gave him a sympathetic smile.

“So,” Rick said, “how are things in Chicago? They still mostly trade with the cities on the east coast, right?”

Miguel snorted. “Don’t trade with anybody, really.”

“Yeah,” Rafael said, “there’s not a lot of trade going back and forth with that coast. New York and Boston have their own problems, and Chicago’s never gotten along well with the cities to the south. At least that’s what people in Chicago told us.”

“They’re doing well on their own then?” Rick asked, keeping his voice casual. “Or are they turning toward the west coast cities, instead?”

“They do well on their own,” Rafael answered. “They’ve got that big lake there, right? If you’re looking for a place to land, you could do a lot worse. A lot of the lake is being used for algae farming, and they always need hands to man the harvest boats. You don’t even have to live in the city itself if you prefer to be away from people.”

“But you didn’t want to stay?” Ana asked.

Rafael shrugged, and looked a little abashed. Miguel snorted a laugh and rolled his eyes at his son. Apparently, this had been a point of contention between them. “I just… wanted to see if things were different, somewhere else,” Rafael said.

“That’s just what we’re doing,” Ana replied.

“It is,” Rick said. “You won’t find any judgment from us. Just…”

Before Rick could say any more, Miguel pulled the pan off the fire and set it on a flattish rock nearby. “Food’s ready,” he said. “Best to eat it before it gets cold.”

For a while, silence fell between them again, as Miguel handed them all wooden skewers and they set to work moving crispy dumplings from the pan to their mouths. Ana popped one in her mouth and immediately spat it back into her hand, wincing at how hot it had been. K wrinkled his nose at her and pointedly blew on the one he had skewered. She stuck out her tongue at him.

The dumpling was filled with some kind of meat, possibly artificial beef, and contained a small explosion of garlic and spice. K’s eyes widened as he chewed.

“This is delicious,” Rick said, and K nodded in agreement.

Miguel smiled slightly, a hint of a proud expression. “Thanks,” he said. “I made them.”

“Dad’s a good cook, right Dad?” Rafael said, and Miguel ducked his head to hide the widening of his smile.

It took very little time for all the dumplings to vanish, and K sat back with a happy sigh. Even the whiskey seemed less horrible after the food.

“So, do you have any advice for us? Any news from the west coast?” Rafael asked as he scrubbed the pan with an oiled cloth.

Rick shrugged. “Some things are good, some things are bad. It’s the same in cities everywhere, probably. Some people don’t have enough, and they get desperate. You’ve just got to be careful. Plus, you know, there’s all the stuff with replicants. Some people think they make things worse, or that the companies that make them have too much power. Probably similar in Chicago, right?” K listened carefully to the conversation, trying to be as nonchalant as Rick was. At his side, Ana was tensely trying to do the same thing.

“Similar, I suppose,” Rafael answered. “Well, except for the replicants. Chicago doesn’t have those. Companies making them aren’t allowed to operate there.”

“Really?” Rick asked, handing over his glass so that Rafael could pour a bit more whiskey into it. “There’s no replicants at all? That’ll be different for you, on the west coast.”

Rafael shrugged. “There might have been replicants. I don’t think _they_ are illegal. Just no one’s making them, in Chicago. I don’t know where they would have come from.”

“People keep themselves to themselves,” Miguel said, nodding approvingly at the thought.

“I think that’ll be true in San Francisco, too,” Rick said.

“That’s fine by us,” Rafael responded. “We just want to live and work. We’re not looking for anything special.”

Rick raised his glass. “Amen to that. Hope you find what you’re looking for.”

“You too,” Rafael said, and first he and then Miguel clinked their glasses against Rick’s. Ana put her own glass forward for the toast, and after a moment, K did too.

***

The next morning, they shared their rasher of mealworm bacon with Rafael and Miguel, frying it up in the same cast iron pan they’d used for the dumplings the night before. Rick even brought out the coffee that they’d been carefully rationing. (Well, Rick and Ana had been rationing it; K had never really liked coffee, and was completely puzzled by how much Rick and Ana seemed to think it was an absolute necessity.)

K sat cross-legged on the edge of the little circle of people, chewing on his bacon and considering. Chicago didn’t have many replicants in their population; did that mean that they wouldn’t have as many tests in place to determine if someone was a replicant or not? Did that mean that they didn’t have Voigt-Kampf experts ready to hand? Did that mean that they wouldn’t have scanners that could detect company barcodes?

Did that mean that he would be able to pass for a regular person?

“What do you think, K?” Ana asked, and K blinked back into reality. He hadn’t been paying attention to the conversations around him. Ana and Rafael had been talking animatedly about something, while Rick and Miguel were sitting with their backs against the van, gazing contentedly into the distance and enjoying each others’ silence.

“I’m sorry, what… What are we discussing?” K asked, hunching his shoulders at the awkwardness.

Ana threw an arm around his shoulders, shaking him slightly. “Pay attention, you,” she said fondly. “We’re talking about ice skating!”

“Ice skating?” K frowned. “Have you done that before?” He’d heard people talk about ice skating in Los Angeles; it was something you had to have a large enclosed space for, and the space had to be kept really cold, which had become increasingly difficult as the temperatures got warmer and warmer. It was sort of shorthand for something that only rich people could do.

“No, never!” Ana said. “But Rafael says that in Chicago, it gets cold enough that ponds freeze! You can just ice skate out in the open air!”

“You still need the skates, though, don’t you?” K asked. He thought that was true. He’d never actually seen ice skates, and had only a vague idea of what they were supposed to look like.

“A lot of people sell them pretty cheaply,” Rafael said. “And you don’t always need them, either. You can just skate around on your shoes, if you want! I did that a couple times while we were there last winter, and it was pretty fun.”

K nodded. “Yeah, that sounds like fun,” he said. He had no idea what that would look like. Now that he thought about it, he really had no idea what was involved in ice skating.

“Maybe we could do that some time!” Ana said, grinning at him. “Do you want to? If we go to Chicago, I mean.”

K felt a sudden grip of fear. Had they decided that when he hadn’t been paying attention? Were they really going to Chicago? Would they be safe there?

Would they be safer there without K? After all, there were no bar codes in Ana’s body. Who knows, she might even be able to pass the Voigt-Kampf test.

Would they be safer without him? Should he leave them now? Were they waiting on him to realize that he shouldn’t be traveling with them anymore? Or would they tell him when it was time for him to go?

The conversation moved like currents in water around him, and he felt like he was keeping himself still in them. He smiled and nodded where it was required of him and finished his bacon and didn’t ask the questions that were resounding in his mind.

_Will you tell me when you want me to go?_

_Will you ask me to leave?_

_Where will I go, if not with you?_

***

It was around mid-morning by the time they parted from Miguel and Rafael. Ana leaned out the window of their vehicle and waved to them as the boxy camper vanished over the horizon in the opposite direction. K sat in the front seat, beside Rick, and stared resolutely at the road ahead.

They drove for a few hours before Rick pulled the truck to the side of the road so that they could all get out and stretch. K leaned against the truck and watched the horizon. He felt too tense to stretch, as if every muscle was wound up like a spring. He was used to feeling that way, but he hadn’t felt it in a while. 

Abruptly, he wished that Joi were there, that he could talk to her. He swallowed hard and tipped his head back against the metal side of the truck, closing his eyes.

“You okay, kid?” Rick asked him, his voice sounding like it was coming from a long distance away.

K pushed himself away from the truck and smiled blandly, the same smile he’d always used around regular people. “I’m fine.”

“If you’re sure. You ready to go, Ana?”

“Yeah, let’s go,” Ana answered, coming back from the tall grass where she’d been relieving herself. “How far are we going to go today?”

“We’ve got a few more hours of good light,” Rick answered. “Probably another four or five. But…” Rick frowned and looked at the road.

“But what?” K asked, keeping his voice calm even as he tensed again.

“Well, if we want to go north, we’ll have to start heading that way soon. We’ll have to start taking turn-offs that go in that direction.”

“If we want to go north?” Ana asked.

“Yeah,” Rick said. “North to Chicago.”

There was a long silence in which K tried very hard not to stare at either of them, not to make it clear how much he wanted to know what they were thinking. He wished he could read their minds. Or maybe he didn’t.

“What do you think, Rick?” Ana asked, sounding almost as nervous as K felt.

Rick shrugged. “It’s not a bad plan. There’s risks involved in going to a city, but it sounds like there’s no legal way for Tyrell to get to us there. And there is some security to be had in a city, too.”

“So what’s your choice?” K asked.

Rick raised an eyebrow at him. “It’s not just my decision, right? We’re all in this.”

“I…” Ana paused, hesitating with a frown. “I want to go. But… I don’t know… I don’t have a lot of experience in the world. I don’t want to make a decision based just on…” She smiled wryly and shrugged. “Based just on ice skating.”

Rick barked a short laugh. “That’s as good a reason as any. Really,” he said in response to Ana’s raised eyebrow. “There’s more to life than surviving. Even when I was in Las Vegas, I had things to make me happy. Being happy is important. It’s as important as anything else. If it wasn’t, K and I would both still be Blade Runners, and we’d both still be miserable.”

“Is that true, K?” Ana said, smiling fondly at him.

K, who was already startled by hearing his name so suddenly, froze for what felt like several long seconds. If happiness hadn’t been important to him… He would never have bought Joi to keep him company. He wouldn’t have brought her with him because he wanted her support. She wouldn’t have…

“Yeah, I guess that’s right,” K said, hoping his smile wasn’t too thin, his voice wasn’t too shaky.

“I would like to go,” Ana said. She took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “So that’s my vote, I guess. I would like to go to Chicago. I’m not sure… I’m not sure I want to live my entire life on the road. Although… I don’t know how I’ll do with all those people. It’s a little intimidating.” She laughed self-deprecatingly. 

“That makes sense,” Rick said. “There’s work on the outskirts, on the lake, Miguel and Rafael said. We could be close to people without being in the heart of the city.”

“What do you think, K?” Ana asked, turning to him. “What’s your vote? Turn north or keep going straight?”

K froze, turning to look at Ana with wide eyes, then turning back to Rick. “Me?” he finally asked, stupidly.

“Yeah, you. You don’t have to just follow us around without a say in things, kid,” Rick said, shaking his head with a small smile and raising an eyebrow at K.

“I…” K looked away from them, then out at the road in front of them. “Can I think about it, for a while? I’ll have decided by the time we reach the next road going north.”

Ana looked at him with concern, but Rick just shrugged again. “Sure. Want the back?”

K nodded gratefully. He didn’t know if Rick knew that K preferred to think without being observed, or if he was offering for some other reason, but he was glad either way.

As they drove, Ana and Rick talked together about things that were very noticeably not Chicago, or turning north, or settling down somewhere. K sat in the back and stared resolutely out the window, watching the landscape roll by. There was a song caught in his head that he didn’t want to be there, and his thoughts kept circling back to Joi, and whether she would be alive if he hadn’t dragged her into… everything.

He could never get away from the marks on him; anyone with the right sensors or tests could find out what he was. What had happened to Joi could happen again, to someone else.

And yet… And yet. He couldn’t forget the soaring feeling of thinking that he was _somebody’s_ , and the crashing feeling of being told that he was not, that he was nothing more than a replicant, a construct, a thing again. Nothing had changed from that moment, he was still just a replicant, he was still legally property of Tyrell. 

But everything had changed, even so.

When they reached the first turn, K did not hesitate. He told Rick he wanted to go north.

***

That night, as K lay stretched out in a sleeping bag under the shelter of a ruined roadside rest stop, he found himself skimming sleep, rather than actually sleeping. Every time he started to drift toward a deeper rest, he would get a feeling like someone was watching him, and every time, he would jerk awake again, expecting to hear the words of the post-mission debrief. He didn’t want to fall back into that dream. He didn’t want to imagine, even for a second, that the life he was currently living wasn’t real.

If his life weren’t real, he reflected as he turned on his side, he would leave the debrief and go back to Joi. She would still be alive. He could talk to her. As much as he cared about Rick and Ana, he still wasn’t able to talk to them the way he had been able to talk to Joi. She had been the first person who had any interest in listening to him.

But if his life weren’t real, he’d still be a Blade Runner. He wouldn’t have ever known that he could be something… else. And he wouldn’t want that.

He could see the shape of Ana, in her sleeping bag next to his. Her shoulder was partially obscuring his view of the moon in the black sky beyond the rest stop roof. He’d never seen a sky so black, before he’d left Los Angeles, and he’d never seen more than a handful of stars, shining through the light pollution here and there. Now, he saw what seemed like an uncountable number, every night. He wouldn’t have wanted to miss out on that, either.

K pushed himself up on his elbow and glanced at the sleeping bag on Ana’s other side. It was flat. He blinked around blearily but saw no sign of Rick.

Well, he probably wasn’t going to get much sleep anyway, not with that dream lurking around the edges of his consciousness. He wriggled out of the bag and grabbed the coat he’d bundled up as a pillow, shrugging it onto his shoulders. He shoved his feet into his shoes and wandered out into the night.

It didn’t take him long to find Rick. He was sitting a little ways away, a ripple in the darkness breaking the pattern of the stars. K made his way carefully over the uneven ground toward him. Rick turned and lifted a hand to wave him over.

“You couldn’t sleep either?” Rick asked as K came to a stop next to him. Rick was sitting on a log, his face tilted up toward the sky. K took a seat next to him.

“No,” he said simply.

“Yeah.” Rick didn’t say anything else, just looked up. K followed his gaze. They sat that way in silence for a long while, until Rick pointed up and asked, “Remember what that one is?”

A couple of months before, Ana had found a book on constellations in a house they were stripping for salvage and brought it with them. It was useless knowledge, given that the old roads were still there for them to navigate by, but it had been fun, sometimes, in the evenings, to match what they were looking at to the designs in the book. Although Ana had initially been the most enthusiastic, strangely enough, it had been Rick who had kept it going, bringing the book out every evening to look up and point things out to them.

Now, K leaned toward him so that he could sight along Rick’s arm at the constellation he was pointing at. He smiled slightly. “Yeah, that’s the easiest one. Big Dipper.”

Rick snorted a laugh. “Lucky guess.”

“If I just say all of them are the Big Dipper, I’ll at least be right some of the time,” K answered in a mock-serious voice. The moonlight glinted off Rick’s teeth as he grinned. “Your turn. What’s that one?” K pointed, and Rick squinted in that direction.

“Orion,” Rick answered. K nodded. “You always pick Orion,” Rick continued, and K shrugged. He didn’t have to call it his favorite, or anything. He’d just been taken by the design drawn into the book, a lone man, up there in the stars, his arm upraised as if to strike a blow; a warrior, trapped in his fight forever.

There was no reason it had to mean anything to him.

“Do you think we’ll be able to see the stars in Chicago?” K asked.

“Don’t know. I’ve never been there to see. If Rafael and Miguel were right about work on the lake, we probably won’t be spending all that much of our time in the city itself.”

“Mm,” K said. He wondered what a lake would be like, how much different it would be than the ocean. He hadn’t really thought of Chicago as more than a nebulous idea of “more people”; the details of their proposed life hadn’t sunk in yet.

“Are you scared?” Rick asked bluntly, after another silent moment watching the stars.

K shrugged, and then, because Rick had saved his life and taught him constellations and deserved better than that, he answered honestly, “Yes.”

“Me too,” Rick said, and barked a self-deprecating laugh.

“Why?” K asked. “Because of me?” He kept his voice neutral, trying his best not to let anything leach into it.

“What?” Rick asked, sounding genuinely surprised. “Why would I be worried about that?”

“Because…” K paused, found Orion again, looked at the upraised arm. His heart was hammering, all of a sudden. “Because, if I were found out… People might look closer. At Ana. I could give her away.”

K startled a bit when he felt one of Rick’s heavy, gnarled hands come down on his shoulder. He didn’t look at Rick, but Rick didn’t seem to mind, just spoke in a steady, even tone, “I wouldn’t go anywhere that I thought wasn’t safe. For Ana, or for you. If we get there and find out Rafael was wrong about Chicago, that they’ll get in our business or try to send us back to Los Angeles, then we’ll just turn around and leave. We’re not going anywhere that we can’t go together.”

K swallowed hard against a sudden ache in his throat, blinked against a sudden stinging in his eyes. “Okay,” he said, his voice coming out as blasted and twisted up as the tree outside Sapper Morton’s farm. “Okay.”

Rick squeezed his shoulder one last time, then released him. He pointed up at the sky again. “What’s that one, you remember?”

K squinted up, his vision twinkling oddly. Too much moisture in his eyes. “Is that… Pegasus?”

“No. Leo. See how Cancer is right there?”

“Oh. Right.” K stared resolutely upward, counting through the zodiac constellations that were visible, and finally asked, “Why are you scared, then?”

Rick huffed, a sound that made K think he was probably rolling his eyes, a pointless gesture in the darkness. K smiled to himself. “Well, what do you think? I’m all for the farming life, I didn’t mind at all when I was living with Sapper, but it didn’t really go well for me, the last time I was on the water, did it? Or in the water, I should say.”

K blinked in surprise. Of course. Rick had almost drowned in the sea, while K had been fighting with Luv. Somehow, with everything that had come after, K had… forgotten about that, a little bit.

K wasn’t the only one who had suffered. Rick had gotten his daughter back, true, but he had lost his home and been forced to fight for his life.

K felt a little ashamed. He had been thinking so hard about what he should do to protect Rick and Ana that he had forgotten that… that they were people who had suffered as much as he had.

“Well,” he said, slapping his palms against his knees in a show of decisiveness, “if you fall off the algae boat, I can drag you out of the water.”

“That a promise?” Rick asked, laughter in his voice that K thought might mask something that was decidedly not laughter.

“Yup,” K answered. “A promise.”


End file.
